Wikipedia spins-off another rival

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 6 Nov 2007 at 11:57

Wikipedia is once again facing competition from a spin-off encylcopaedia created by a former employee.

Veropedia created by ex-Wikipedian, Danny Wool, will take the best articles from Wikipedia and send them to experts in the appropriate field for verification. These articles will then be posted on the site as static pages that are not editable by users, as well as being sent back to Wikipedia.

Roughly 100 hand-picked Wikipedia contributors will be allowed to correct any errors, who have been chosen because of the "quality of the content they have created and edited" in the past, according to Veropedia.

As well as fact-checking articles on historical events and inanimate objects, people with Wikipedia entries will also be contacted, and asked to confirm details about themselves.

Currently there are fewer than 4,000 articles on Veropedia, so the scope of the subject matter is still very limited. This means that some very niche topics have already been covered, while obvious ones have not. London, for example, doesn't have an entry, while gamma ray burst progenitors do.

The cost of running the site will be offset with advertising, such as the Amazon adverts that are already in place.

This isn't the first time that a Wikipedia employee has left to set up a rival encyclopaedia. Last year, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger created Citizendium, which aims to improve the reliability of content by forcing users to reveal their real names, and having experts verify each entry, while still retaining the ability for users to edit articles.